By Corbin Apkin, Archivist

Rod Serling, creator of the classic television series The Twilight Zone, was never one to hold back. Whether expressing his opinions through the use of fantasy and Sci-Fi or in interviews, he was known to speak his mind and offer his views on society.

The Twilight Zone, which ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1964, is known for its forward-thinking plots. Looking back at the show now, viewers have found that many episodes are even prescient. At the forefront was creator and writer Rod Serling, who wrote 92 of the 156 episodes. While using Sci-Fi plots, he was able to convey his own feelings about society and where the world was and was heading in the early 1960s. As one writer has noted, the show’s “…veil of science fiction and the supernatural allowed Serling to engage in social criticism with relative abandon.”¹ Many episodes reflected his fear of the use of atomic weapons, such as “Time Enough at Last,” “The Shelter,” “Two” and “The Old Man in the Cave.”

Between 1962 and 1963, Rod Serling wrote three letters to President Kennedy that can now be found in our archives as part of the White House Central Name File. The Name File is a collection of correspondence sent to and from the White House and is arranged alphabetically by the name of the person or organization that sent the letter. As such, it’s a great resource for looking up specific people to see if they may have written to the President. A lot of constituent mail was kept by the White House, and luckily, we have these letters that Serling sent to President Kennedy.

Serling’s first letter to the White House, dated January 18, 1962, is a description of his thoughts on Communism and how Kennedy and the United States could combat it. He saw Communism as an ideological battle that could lead to the conquering of “…this entire planet, but, significantly, without the necessity of another major war.”

Serling’s second letter focuses on his thoughts on diversity, noting that “equality tends to unite people who feel free as individuals.” While there aren’t many Twilight Zone episodes that feature Black actors, one exception is the 1960 episode “The Big Tall Wish,” which was an early episode of television featuring a main cast entirely of Black actors. Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, writes that in 1960, casting Black actors “…in a dramatic show not dealing with racial issues was something practically unheard of, but this was a deliberate move on Serling’s part.”² This episode was so notable at the time that it contributed to Serling winning the “1961 Unity Award for Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations.”³ Making known his thoughts about the exclusion of Black actors in Hollywood, Serling was quoted as saying “Television, like its big sister, the motion picture, has been guilty of the sin of omission… Hungry for talent, desperate for the so-called ‘new face,’ constantly searching for a transfusion of new blood, it has overlooked a source of wondrous talent that resides under its nose. This is the Negro actor.”⁴ In response to the television censorship of the time, Serling said “I think it’s criminal that we are not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils as they exist.”⁵ This attitude and emphasis on inclusion comes through in the letter that Serling wrote to President Kennedy on March 26, 1962.

In this letter, Rod Serling takes issue with President Kennedy’s interpretation of diversity in society from his March 23, 1962 speech at Berkeley. He then goes on to agree with the president on his statement on Communism, ending the letter supporting Kennedy to pursue disarmament with the Soviet Union, and encouraging him to “Be brave, Jack.”

While Serling does express disagreements with President Kennedy in the May 1962 letter, his language is fairly cordial in these earliest letters. This is not as much the case in the last letter he penned to the White House.

Serling, with actor Arthur Kennedy, wrote a July 4, 1963 letter to the White House which was much more blunt than his previous correspondence. In it, they strongly criticize President Kennedy for the language used in his famous June 26, 1963 Berlin speech. They take issue with the President’s statements about Communism, seeing this language as extreme and alienating. They even evoke the ghost of Adolf Hitler, which, interestingly enough [*spoiler alert for a 61-year-old television episode*] was a plot device in The Twilight Zone episode “He’s Alive” that aired six months before he wrote this letter. While Serling ended his May 1962 letter with the encouraging “Be brave, Jack,” they end this letter with “Who are you, Mr. President?”

In his earlier letter, Serling made it clear that he wanted the president to work towards disarmament with the Soviet Union. His complaint in this letter seems to be that he sees this speech as shying away from working with the Soviet Union to end the arms race. This also tracks with his sentiment that he saw the tone of the Berlin speech as very different from the tone of the President’s June 10, 1963 American University speech, where President Kennedy said “In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours.” Serling appears to have seen the American University speech as a call to achieve the United States’ and Soviet Union’s mutually beneficial goal of disarmament, but the Berlin speech as doing the opposite.

Despite Serling’s criticisms seen in these letters, those who knew Serling (or have written about him) note that he supported President Kennedy overall. Rod Serling’s daughter, Anne Serling, says in her memoir, As I Knew Him, “At the beginning of the 1960s, my dad is a huge supporter of John Kennedy. We have bumper stickers and buttons and my parents talk a lot about the Kennedys.”⁶ One biographer discusses Serling’s thoughts on Kennedy, saying: “Serling had admired and supported Kennedy, and despite admitting that his recollections might be distorted by the circumstances of Kennedy’s death, Serling subsequently recalled Kennedy as ‘a gracious man, and a wise man, and a temperate man…. And I think potentially this might have been the great American president. I’m not sure. But I rather think so.’”⁷ Serling seemed to avoid viewing the world  in black and white, as evidenced by The Twilight Zone, and both supported President Kennedy’s work while also urging him to move the world in the direction of disarmament, even if he needed to use strong language to do so. As his daughter Anne says, “My father is outspoken and passionate about his political views… My dad is neither a pacifist nor a knee-jerk dove.”⁸

When President Kennedy was assassinated, Rod Serling was deeply affected. He wrote, “More than a man has died… What is to be mourned now is an ideal. What has been murdered is a belief in our own decency…”⁹ He even wrote an episode alluding to the assassination in the fifth season of The Twilight Zone: “I Am the Night–Color Me Black.” In this episode, various places around the world suddenly don’t see the sunrise in the morning and instead are draped in darkness. A radio report lists the places seeing this phenomenon, and “The first place mentioned is Dallas, Texas. This was not a random selection. Although Serling’s script is not explicit, the darkness in the Dallas sky was born the day that President Kennedy was assassinated four months earlier.”¹⁰

December 25th, 2024 marks what would have been Rod Serling’s 100th birthday. A century after he was born, his ideas still live on and have become a part of the popular zeitgeist. Serling wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, as we can see clearly in his groundbreaking show The Twilight Zone and in the letters he wrote to President John F. Kennedy. Throughout the show and in these letters, we can see Serling’s commitment to inclusion, nuclear disarmament and peace. Serling himself made it clear how he felt about the world in the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter” (which itself was hurried onto air in response to the 1961 Berlin Crisis¹¹): “For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized.”¹²

1. Colin Marshall, “What ‘The Twilight Zone’ Reveals About Today’s Prestige TV,” New Yorker, April 14, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-the-twilight-zone-reveals-about-todays-prestige-tv. ↩︎
2. Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 3rd ed. (Silman-James Press, 2018), 103. ↩︎
3. “Awards,” Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, accessed November 1, 2024, https://rodserling.com/awards/ ↩︎
4. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 103. ↩︎
5. Marshall, “What ‘The Twilight Zone’ Reveals About Today’s Prestige TV.” ↩︎
6. Anne Serling, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling (Commonwealth Book Company), 212. ↩︎
7. Nicholas Parisi, Rod Serling: His Life, Work and Imagination (University of Mississippi Press), 182. ↩︎
8. Anne Serling, As I Knew Him, 213-214 ↩︎
9. Anne Serling, As I Knew Him, 213 ↩︎
10. Parisi, Rod Serling, 181. ↩︎
11. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001), 143-44. ↩︎
12. The Twilight Zone, season 3, episode 3, “The Shelter,” written by Rod Serling, directed by Lamont Johnson, aired September 29, 1961, on CBS, https://www.paramountplus.com/
    shows/video/659852108/. ↩︎
13. Columbia Broadcasting System, Rod Serling, photograph, Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed November 8, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rod-Serling. ↩︎